Sharps enclosures have been developed of stainless steel metal to safely and securely contain infectious sharps material such as syringe needles, after their use. Such lockable sharps enclosure may take the form of that manufactured and sold under the trademark SHARP SAFES by the Monoject Division of Sherwood Medical, a Brunswick Company of St. Louis, Mo. The lockable enclosure of Monoject utilizes a rectilinear parallelepiped metal container which includes a hinged door and supports internally, a removable upwardly open plastic tray. Within the tray is disposed a plastic bag whose open end is placed over the corners of the inner container and disposed beneath a convenient deposit port formed by a tubular plastic member which projects through a hole within the side or top of the outer enclosure. This permits a complete syringe with needle to be gravity dropped or laterally inserted through the tubular deposit port, whereby it falls into the plastic bag.
Periodically, a hospital employee opens the locked door, removes the inner container bearing the plastic bag within which the syringes collect, grasps the edges of the bag and rolls the edges to close the bag and places the bag in a further container or collection cart. As can be appreciated, such disposal system allows the needles to easily puncture the bags with the possibility of infection to the personnel coming into contact with the exposed sharp needle tip.
Further, due to the danger of spread of infection, while sharps such as the needle of a syringe is required to be disposed of, the barrel and plunger components of the syringe may be re-used with reprocessing. It is, therefore, advantageous to facilitate separation of the needle from the syringe barrel, further dispose of the needle, and achieve those ends without the hazzard of spreading infection.
It is, therefore, a primary object of the present invention to provide an improved sharps material disposal container which facilitates separation of the disposable needle from a syringe barrel, storage of the disposable needles in a locked manner, and which facilitates removal of accumulated needle or otherwise infectious sharps material from the container when unlocked.